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Christopher Ketcham Quotes

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Famous Christopher Ketcham Quotes

“Everything I thought about cows as an Easterner-come-west is wrong. They are not symbols of a noble culture of mounted herdsmen. They are not cute. They are an invasive species, Bos Taurus, a water-loving European animal not fit for arid climates, and their cancer-like effects on the land have not ceased.”

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Book:This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption are Ruining the American West
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“Public grazing provides just one dollar out of every $2,500 of taxable income in the West, or 0.04 percent, and just one out of everything 1,400 jobs, or 0.07 percent. On both public and private lands in the eleven Western states, the livestock industry accounts for less than 0.5 percent of all income.”

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Book:This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption are Ruining the American West
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“The argument goes like this: even if public grazing contributes almost nothing to local economies and national food production, it nonetheless supports "an important western lifestyle and the rural west's social and cultural fabric." If we keep ranchers working on the range, on the big wide-open of the public domain, we ensure the historical continuity of a "custom" that has gone on for close to 150 years.”

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Book:This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption are Ruining the American West
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